Notes on
PSYCHIATRIC FASCISM

by Don WeitzToronto, Ontario

For almost 150 years, psychiatry has been masquerading as a
medical science and as a branch of medicine. It is not and never
was a science or a type of health care. Modern psychiatry is driven
by unproved
empirical assumptions, medical biases, and pseudo-scientific
opinions. There are no scientifically established,
independently proven facts in psychiatry. Psychiatry, in
fact, has no laws or testable hypotheses and no coherent and
comprehensive theory. Psychiatry conspicuously lacks
scientific proof or evidence to support its news-media-parroted claims
of "mental illness" or "disorders".

After about seventy years of psychiatric practices and research,
there is still no diagnostic test for schizophrenia or any of the
other three hundred so-called mental disorders listed in the
current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders (DSM), which is essentially a list of class-driven
moral judgements of allegedly abnormal behaviour, published and
propagandized by the American Psychiatric Association. The
DSM is the official bible of organized psychiatry. The DSM is the
equivalent of the Malleus Maleficarum in the middle ages, which
Spanish inquisitors used to identify, target, stigmatize and burn witches
and heretics. Today's witches, heretics, and
scapegoats are labeled mentally ill or schizophrenic.

Hospital psychiatry with its emphasis on the control of inmate
behaviour through high risk behaviour modification programs,
biological "treatments", physical and mechanical restraints,
locked doors and wards, and seclusion/isolation rooms, have
always exhibited several fascist elements. I want to focus
on three: fear, force and fraud. These are
the guiding principles and policies used to control citizens and
groups in the population whom government leaders and other
authorities, including the police and so-called mental health
experts, have judged to be dissident, problematic or difficult to
control. Hospital psychiatry is very similar to the
prison system. In the prison or correctional system
psychiatrists have been used as consultants to design dangerous,
unethical behaviour modification programs and to conduct high
risk drug experiments on prisoners. Both the psychiatric
system and the prison system systematically use fear, force and
fraud for the purpose of social control and punishment - not for purposes of
treatment or rehabilitation, both of which are euphemisms.
It is or should be obvious that forced treatment is in fact
punishment. It is frequently cruel and usual and should
therefore be banned in the United States under that nation's Eighth
constitutional amendment.
Virtually all treatments in psychiatric facilities are forced or
administered without informed consent. They are administered against
the "patient's" (the prisoner's) will or with consent obtained by
threatening the "patient" with worse consequences, or with consent
obtained by keeping the "patient" unaware of important information about
serious risks and alternatives. Informed consent in psychiatry is a
cruel sham. It doesn't exist.

Fear/Terror - "Terror acts powerfully upon the body
through the medium of the mind and should be employed in the cure
of madness. Fear accompanied with pain and the sense of
shame has sometimes cured the disease". That was written
almost two centuries ago in 1818 by Dr. Benjamin Rush, father of
American psychiatry, and the first president of the APA, whose face still
appears on the official seal of the American Psychiatric
Association. Dr.
Rush advocated and practiced terror by designing and using the
straitjacket, the tranquilizer chair and "fear of death" on
numerous inmates in 19th century lunatic asylums. Rush once
had his son locked up in an insane asylum - some father!

Fear is a powerful motivator in enforcing conformity, obedience
and making people submit to authority. Historically,
inducing and manipulating fear or masked terror has always been a
key policy and practice in all fascist regimes, such as Italy
under Mussolini, Nazi Germany under Hitler, and the Soviet Union
under Stalin - in fact, under any dictatorship. The threat
of punishment, torture and the threat of being killed is enough
to cause fear, panic, and terror if most of us. We do as
we're told or else.

As used in psychiatry, fear or terror is more selective but is
widespread and powerful. In the institution, psychiatry
frequently resorts to blackmail to control the more
"uncontrollable" and difficult or non-compliant patient.
Psychiatrists and other therapists threaten their patients with
longer incarceration, higher doses of forced neuroleptics or
"antidepressants", and/or threatened transfers to more severe
maximum security institutions if they misbehave, fail to follow
doctors' orders, refuse to take their "medication", refuse to
follow institutional rules, or annoy their captors in other ways.
Generally
aimed at captive populations of involuntary patients, these
threats typically strike fear in many of them, and psychiatrists
know it. For example, some years ago, several patients and
former patients of Queen Street Mental Health Centre, Toronto's
notorious mental hospital or psycho-prison, told me and other
activist-critics that psychiatrists have threatened, if they
didn't calm down or control themselves, to transfer them to
Penetang, the Oakridge division of Penetanguishene Mental Health
Centre, a maximum security behaviour modification facility in
Ontario, known for its harsh and brutal environment.
Penetang was and still is recognized as punishment, one of the
most barbaric psycho-prisons in Canada. It should have been
shut down years ago, especially after a scathing report about
many of its abuses by psychiatrist Steven Harper.

Threatening patients with physical restraints or solitary
confinement is also extremely effective in arousing fear or panic
in patients. On virtually every psychiatric ward or unit,
there is a place, euphemistically called "The Quiet Room", a
barren and forbidden cell-like room, with a mattress or sink,
usually no toilet or blankets. While languishing the quiet
room, patients are sometimes further restrained by leather cuffs,
two-point and four-point restraints, tightly wrapped around their
wrists and/or ankles so they can barely move, for hours at a
time. The mere threat of loss of freedom, involuntary
committal, or being locked up in a psychiatric ward or
institution against your will, and without any trial or public
hearing, is enough to frighten most of us. In virtually
every province and territory in Canada, these are the main
criteria or reasons for being locked up or committed to a
psychiatric institution: judgement of mental illness or
disorder; judgement of threatening to physically hurt yourself or
another person; judgement of being unable to look after
yourself. Note that these criteria are subjective moral
judgements of dissident behaviour based on observation and
opinion, not medical or scientific facts. Despite the fact
that mental illness or mental disorder, which in my opinion is a
metaphor for dissidence, has never been officially
classified as a medical disease or illness, only physicians are
legally authorized to make these non-medical and fateful
judgements.

In Ontario, any doctor can sign a committal form which forces an
individual to be locked up in any psychiatric facility for the
first 72 hours for observation and assessment. Two other
doctors can sign a form authorizing an individual's imprisonment
for another 2-4 weeks. During the last few years,
approximately 50% of thousands of people treated in Ontario's
nine psychiatric hospitals were involuntarily committed.

The threat or fact of losing your freedom being locked up in a
psychiatric facility for days or months at a time is terrifying. The
minimal or non-existent advocacy currently provided in Ontario makes the
right to appeal or protest a sham, and this serves to heighten people's
fear and despair. The mere threat of forced psychiatric
treatment as well as the treatment itself can be terrorizing - e.g.,
electroshock, also called electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), but more
accurately called electro-convulsive brainwashing by shock survivor
critics such as Leonard Frank. My close friend Mel told me of being
dragged by several aids along the hallway to a hospital shockroom. I
can imagine his terror and the terror of others who suffered
the same fate. I suffered a similar terror when I was forcibly subjected to over 50 subcoma insulin shocks in the 1950s. To the surprise of many people, this
barbaric brain-damaging and memory destroying treatment not only
exists, but is expanding in Canada and the United States.
Its main targets are women and the elderly, particularly elderly
women.

There is also the threat of psychiatric drugs, euphemistically
called "medication". These chemicals such as minor
tranquilizers, antidepressants and the anti-psychotics such as
Haldol, Modicate, Thorazine, and the so-called mood
modifier Lithium, are not natural substances but are manufactured
poisons, aptly called neurotoxins by psychiatrist and psychiatry critic Peter
Breggin in several of his books and Joseph Glenmullen, a clinical
instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, in his book Prozac
Backlash. These chemicals have no scientifically proven
medical value or benefit. What they do is control or subdue
any problematic or disturbing behaviour, mood and emotion.
These toxins, particularly neuroleptics like Haldol, Modicate,
Chlorpromazine, are so disabling, powerful and fearsome
that many psychiatric survivors and other critics call them
chemical lobotomies or chemical straitjackets. These drugs
have many serious and disabling effects, called "side effects" to
minimize how they are perceived, such as trembling,
uncontrollable shaking or movement of the hands or other parts of
the body (which occur in the neurological disorder such as
Parkinsonism or tardive dyskenisia), powerful muscular cramps,
blurred vision, restless pacing, nightmares, sudden outbursts of
anger, agitation, memory loss, fainting, blood disorders,
seizures, and sudden death. These so-called side effects
are the drugs' intended effects. This fear of
psychiatric drugs is compounded by ignorance and uncertainty,
because psychiatrists and other doctors fail to inform patients
of the drugs' horrific effects.

Without the use or threat of force, fascism could not
exist. Machiavelli, Mussolini, Hitler knew this. All
dictators, would-be dictators, and bullies know this basic
fact. And this is the case with psychiatry. Without
the use and threat of force, institutional psychiatry would
die. Lots of psychiatrists would be out of a job. I
wish that would happen! Psychiatry gets its authority and
power to force, imprison, involuntarily commit, and treat
individuals against their will from the state.

Mental health legislation gives psychiatrists and other
physicians the power to involuntarily commit any person they
"believe", after only minutes of examination, to be dangerous to
themselves or others. This is problematic. The
Mental Health Act wrongly assumes that doctors can predict
dangerous and violent behaviour, which they cannot do. It
is worth emphasizing that Ontario's Mental Health Act, as with
other mental health acts across Canada and the United States,
legally sanction the state to use force to detain or imprison
people for days, weeks or months at a time. Unfortunately,
there has never been a public outcry or protest over the fact
that people judged or assumed to be crazy or dangerous, but not
charged with any crime, can nevertheless be locked up without a
trial or the legal rights accorded to people charged with crimes such
as murder or rape. This is prevention detention,
which is illegal in Canada and other so-called democratic
countries, but it is legal and a common practice in all police
states and totalitarian countries. I know of
no lawsuit challenge to involuntary committal as preventive
detention and therefore as unconstitutional.

In institutional psychiatry in fascist states, forced treatment
is the rule, not the exception. Forced treatment and
tortuous terminal medical experiments inflicted on thousands of
Jews, gypsies, political prisoners, women and children, were
carried out in death camps during World War II throughout Nazi
Germany. There is now irrefutable, documentary evidence
that it was the German psychiatrists, particularly prominent
professors of psychiatry, and psychiatry department heads, who
were chiefly responsible for initiating and administering the
infamous T4 program, which involved the mass murder of over
200,000 mental patients and thousands of sick and disabled
children and adults during the holocaust. The term
euthanasia and mercy death to describe this murderous program is
a cruel euphemism.

Much of biological psychiatry, which is largely based on unproved
assumptions about the biological and genetic causes of
schizophrenia and other mental disorders, can be traced back to
the racist, eugenics-driven psychiatrist in Nazi Germany, Ernst
Rudin, who propagated the myth that schizophrenia is a
genetic disease. He, along with hundreds of other
psychiatrists in the T4 program of mass murder of psychiatric
patients, is still cited in some psychiatric journal articles, as
documented by researcher-activist Lenny Lapon in his brilliant
book, Mass Murderers in White Coats: Psychiatric Genocide in
Nazi Germany. He states that several German
psychiatrists from the Nazi era emigrated to the United States
and Canada and succeeded in indoctrinating many of his colleagues
in his biological, genetic and racist theories of mental
illness. Heinz Layman who emigrated to Canada in 1937, is
chiefly responsible for introducing Thorazine or Chlorpromazine,
and propagated the use of psychiatric drugs in Canada.

We now have an epidemic of brain damage caused by psychiatric drugs, partly due
to Layman and all the other doctors he taught. In one 1954
journal article, Layman admitted that Thorazine was a
"pharmacological substitute for lobotomy". Despite publicly
acknowledging this alarming fact, it never stopped Layman from
using it on many "schizophrenic" patients in Montreal's Douglas
Hospital. Layman also persuaded Ewen Cameron to administer
chlorpromazine and many other drugs and massive amounts of
electroshock. Chlorpromazine, considered an experimental
drug at the time, was widely used on many patients during
Cameron's infamous brainwashing experiments at the Allan Memorial
Institute in the 1950s and 1960s.

There was no informed consent then, and there is none now. During
the Nazi years, the doctors didn't seek permission. According to
Nazi ideology,
these were "useless eaters", "subhumans". This is a mindset that
still rules in biological psychiatry throughout North America.
Another legacy of psychiatry in Nazi Germany is the widespread acceptance
and justification of abuse to break
the will of non-compliant or rebellious patients. Physical
or mechanical restraints such as straps, ropes, belts, handcuffs
and solitary confinement are used in psychiatric institutions not
to treat or protect but to punish people for dissident or
rebellious behaviour. It is this naked display of force and
threats against patients by hospital staff which resembles the
awesome brutality of German psychiatric staff during the
holocaust.

Fraud: A very apt quote by Leonard Roy Frank, author of
Influencing Minds is "Mystification is psychiatry's
defense against the danger of being found out". Many of the
labels or diagnoses used by psychiatrists do not refer to real
psychiatric problems or to actual illnesses. Psychiatry professor
Thomas Szasz
has exposed the fraud and the myth of the concept of
mental illness in many books, starting with his classic The Myth of
Mental Illness. This misrepresentation one of the
greatest scientific scandals in our scientific age. The
code words that are now used in biological psychiatry such as
anti-depressants do not assist people with overcoming
depression or get at the causes of depression. The term
"Quiet Room" is a fraudulent code for solitary confinement.
The word "medication" is also a misleading euphemism and
misrepresentation for toxic substances to which many of us have
been subjected.

I've tried to show that institutional, coercive psychiatry has a
fascist history and that biological psychiatry as practiced today
in psychiatric facilities in Canada and the United States is
still based on fear, force and fraud. Psychiatry does not
deserve public or government support. We must work to
abolish psychiatry. We must
also continue working to create self-help advocacy groups, more
drop-in centers, and more affordable, supportive housing in our
communities. We need to create our own alternatives to the
monstrous and evil mental health system. By doing this, we
empower ourselves. This is our work, our challenge, and our
hope.

Copyright 2001 by Don Weitz - used by permission

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